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Full-Text Articles in Law

A Crazy Quilt: Infanticide In The United States, Susan Ayres Oct 2023

A Crazy Quilt: Infanticide In The United States, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter builds on previous research to present a sampling of cases in the US, primarily in the twenty-first century, in order to show the harshness and disparity in criminal charges, defences and sentences. The broad term ‘infanticide’ is used for child-murder cases, and the more specific term ‘neonaticide’ is used for the killing of a child in the first 24 hours after birth. This chapter also describes the more recent use of genetic genealogy to solve cold cases of neonaticide. It concludes by considering how the absence of an infanticide offence and expanded defences results in an incoherent, unjust …


Bending The Rules Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn, Julia Simon-Kerr Oct 2023

Bending The Rules Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn, Julia Simon-Kerr

Faculty Scholarship

The evidence rules have well-established, standard textual meanings—meanings that evidence professors teach their law students every year. Yet, despite the rules’ clarity, courts misapply them across a wide array of cases: Judges allow past acts to bypass the propensity prohibition, squeeze hearsay into facially inapplicable exceptions, and poke holes in supposedly ironclad privileges. And that’s just the beginning.

The evidence literature sees these misapplications as mistakes by inept trial judges. This Article takes a very different view. These “mistakes” are often not mistakes at all, but rather instances in which courts are intentionally bending the rules of evidence. Codified evidentiary …


Silencing Litigation Through Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey, Christopher K. Odinet Oct 2023

Silencing Litigation Through Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

Bankruptcy is being used as a tool for silencing survivors and their families. When faced with claims from multiple plaintiffs related to the same wrongful conduct that can financially or operationally crush the defendant over the long term—a phenomenon we identify as onslaught litigation—defendants harness bankruptcy’s reorganization process to draw together those who allege harm and pressure them into a swift, universal settlement. In doing so, they use the bankruptcy system to deprive survivors of their voice and the public of the truth. This Article identifies this phenomenon and argues that it is time to rein in this destructive use …


Vaccine Development, The China Dilemma, And International Regulatory Challenges, Peter K. Yu Oct 2023

Vaccine Development, The China Dilemma, And International Regulatory Challenges, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the role played by China in the development of international regulatory standards at the intersection of intellectual prop- erty, international trade, and public health. It begins by briefly discussing the role China has played in the global health arena during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article then highlights the difficulty in determining how best to engage with the country in the development of new international regula- tory standards. It shows that the preferred method of engagement will likely depend on one’s perspective on China’s potential contributions and hin- drances: a perspective that focuses on global competition—in the economic, …


Two Decades Of Trips In China, Peter K. Yu Sep 2023

Two Decades Of Trips In China, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews China’s engagement with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in the past twenty years. It begins by highlighting TRIPS-related developments in the first decade of China’s WTO membership. The chapter then discusses the country’s ‘innovative turn’ in the mid-2000s and the ramifications of its changing policy positions. This chapter continues to examine the US-China trade war, in particular the second TRIPS complaint that the United States filed against China in March 2018. It concludes with observations about the impact of the TRIPS Agreement on China, China’s impact on that agreement and how the …


The Unfulfilled Promise Of Self-Determination In Court-Connected Mediation, Peter Reilly Aug 2023

The Unfulfilled Promise Of Self-Determination In Court-Connected Mediation, Peter Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

In the context of mediation, party self-determination refers to the ability of disputants to have power, control, and autonomy in the process. There are numerous process design questions involved in running a mediation, no matter its subject matter. Consider just one example: “Should the mediation be conducted in-person, or virtually?” The answer to this question can have a profound impact on the direction and course of a mediation, including its outcome. Yet, in the context of court-connected mediation, disputing parties are not consistently provided the opportunity to give input on how such process design questions are resolved. In fact, these …


Legal Clutter: How Concurring Opinions Create Unnecessary Confusion And Encourage Litigation, Meg Penrose Aug 2023

Legal Clutter: How Concurring Opinions Create Unnecessary Confusion And Encourage Litigation, Meg Penrose

Faculty Scholarship

Good judges are clear writers. And clear writers avoid legal clutter. Legal clutter occurs when judges publish multiple individually written opinions that are neither useful nor necessary. This essay argues that concurring opinions are the worst form of legal clutter. Unlike majority opinions, concurring opinions are legal asides, musings of sorts—often by a single judge—that add length and confusion to an opinion often without adding meaningful value. Concurring opinions do not change the outcome of a case. Unlike dissenting opinions, they do not claim disagreement with the ultimate decision. Instead, concurring opinions merely offer an idea or viewpoint that failed …


Negotiation Theories Engage Hybrid Warfare, Nancy Welsh, Sharon Press, Andrea Kupfer Schneider Jul 2023

Negotiation Theories Engage Hybrid Warfare, Nancy Welsh, Sharon Press, Andrea Kupfer Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of hybrid warfare has arisen recently to describe the efforts, short of outright war, used by nations to disrupt and destabilize each other. This Article reviews available negotiation theories, concepts and skills to determine whether they can help governmental actors and business organizations targeted by hybrid warfare respond effectively. In other words, can negotiation theories, concepts and skills be used to engage effectively in “hybrid conflict management”? The Article urges that international diplomacy and multiparty negotiation theories and skills, as well as the more recent scholarship that has developed regarding hostage negotiation and “wicked problems,” are likely to …


Confidentiality Clauses In Settlement Agreements After The Consumer Review Fairness Act, Wayne Barnes Jul 2023

Confidentiality Clauses In Settlement Agreements After The Consumer Review Fairness Act, Wayne Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

Online commerce has skyrocketed in recent years, and shoppers are purchasing goods or services online in greater numbers every year. The COVID-19 pandemic has only hastened the trend. One significant aspect of online shopping is the presence of consumer reviews posted by prior purchasers of goods or services, describing their experience with the products, the services and/or the selling merchant. A vast majority of online shoppers say that they rely on these reviews to help inform their purchasing decisions. Positive reviews can be tremendously beneficial to a business’ profitability, whereas negative reviews can be equally detrimental. Users of the internet …


A Theory Of Interests In The Context Of Hybrid Warfare: It's Complex, Cynthia Alkon, Sanda Kaufman Jul 2023

A Theory Of Interests In The Context Of Hybrid Warfare: It's Complex, Cynthia Alkon, Sanda Kaufman

Faculty Scholarship

We will begin with a discussion about how the hybrid warfare context is different from other conflict contexts. We will describe some complexity aspects that make hybrid warfare challenging to negotiators. We will then discuss whether classical negotiation theory prescriptions apply to a hybrid warfare context, especially regarding interests. We will argue that these prescriptions related to classical negotiations are unlikely to work in this context. We will focus our analysis on a subset of hybrid warfare attacks, consisting of short-term, time-sensitive, high-risk crises, where negotiations are possible and necessary, such as ransom demands, rather than on hybrid warfare situations …


Black And Blue Police Arbitration Reforms, Michael Z. Green Jun 2023

Black And Blue Police Arbitration Reforms, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

The racial justice protests that engulfed the country after seeing a video of the appalling killing of a Black male, George Floyd, by a Minnesota police officer in 2020 has led to a tremendous number of questions about dealing with racial issues in policing. Similar concerns arose a little more than fifty years ago when police unions gained power to respond to the civil rights protests occurring during those times by establishing strong protections for their officers in light of brutality claims. This rhythmic progression of protests and union responses is destined to continue without any lasting reforms focused on …


Beneath The Property Taxes Financing Education, Timothy M. Mulvaney Jun 2023

Beneath The Property Taxes Financing Education, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

Many states turn in sizable part to local property taxes to finance public education. Political and academic discourse on the extent to which these taxes should serve in this role largely centers on second-order issues, such as the vices and virtues of local control, the availability of mechanisms to redistribute property tax revenues across school districts, and the overall stability of those revenues. This Essay contends that such discourse would benefit from directing greater attention to the justice of the government’s threshold choices about property law and policy that impact the property values against which property taxes are levied.

The …


"They Don't Know What They Don't Know": A Study Of Diversion In Lieu Of Lawyer Discipline, Leslie C. Levin, Susan Saab Fortney Jun 2023

"They Don't Know What They Don't Know": A Study Of Diversion In Lieu Of Lawyer Discipline, Leslie C. Levin, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyer misconduct can have devastating consequences for clients. But what is the appropriate regulatory response when lawyers make less serious mistakes? For almost thirty years, jurisdictions have offered some lawyers diversion in lieu of discipline. Diversion is intended to help educate lawyers or treat those with impairments so that they do not reoffend. Yet remarkably little is known about how diversion operates, whether it is used appropriately, and how well it seems to work. This Article addresses these questions. It draws on the limited published data and on interviews with disciplinary regulators in twenty-nine jurisdictions about their use of diversion. …


Forum Fights And Fundamental Rights: Amenability’S Distorted Frame, James P. George Jun 2023

Forum Fights And Fundamental Rights: Amenability’S Distorted Frame, James P. George

Faculty Scholarship

Framing—the subtle use of context to suggest a conclusion—is a dubious alternative to direct argumentation. Both the brilliance and the bane of marketing, framing also creeps into supposedly objective analysis. Law offers several examples, but a lesser known one is International Shoe’s two-part jurisdictional test. The framing occurs in the underscoring of defendant’s due process rights contrasted with plaintiff’s “interests” which are often dependent on governmental interests. This equation ignores, both rhetorically and analytically, the injured party’s centuries-old rights to—not interests in—a remedy in an open and adequate forum.

Even within the biased frame, the test generally works, if not …


Rethinking Education Theft Through The Lens Of Intellectual Property And Human Rights, Peter K. Yu Jun 2023

Rethinking Education Theft Through The Lens Of Intellectual Property And Human Rights, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay problematizes the increased propertization and commodification of education and calls for a rethink of the emergent concept of “education theft” through the lens of intellectual property and human rights. This concept refers to the phenomenon where parents, or legal guardians, enroll children in schools outside their school districts by intentionally violating the residency requirements. The Essay begins by revisiting the debate on intellectual property rights as property rights. It discusses the ill fit between intellectual property law and the traditional property model, the impediments the law has posed to public access to education, and select reforms that have …


Personhood, Property, And Public Education: The Case Of Plyler V. Doe, Rachel F. Moran Jun 2023

Personhood, Property, And Public Education: The Case Of Plyler V. Doe, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Property law is having a moment, one that is getting education scholars’ attention. Progressive scholars are retooling the concepts of ownership and entitlement to incorporate norms of equality and inclusion. Some argue that property law can even secure access to public education despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s longstanding refusal to recog- nize a right to basic schooling. Others worry that property doctrine is inherently exclusionary. In their view, property-based concepts like resi- dency have produced opportunity hoarding in schools that serve affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods. Many advocates therefore believe that equity will be achieved only by moving beyond property-based claims, …


Latinas In The Legal Academy: Progress And Promise, Raquel E. Aldana, Emile Loza De Siles, Solangel Maldonado, Rachel F. Moran Jun 2023

Latinas In The Legal Academy: Progress And Promise, Raquel E. Aldana, Emile Loza De Siles, Solangel Maldonado, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

The 2022 Inaugural Graciela Oliva ́rez Latinas in the Legal Academy (“GO LILA”) Workshop convened seventy-four outstanding and powerful Latina law professors and professional legal educators (collectively, “Latinas in the legal academy,” or “LILAs”) to document and celebrate our individual and collective journeys and to grow stronger together. In this essay, we, four of the Latina law professors who helped to co-found the GO LILA Workshop, share what we learned about and from each other. We invite other LILAs to join our community and share their stories and journeys. We hope that the data and lessons that we share can …


(A)Woke Workplaces, Michael Z. Green May 2023

(A)Woke Workplaces, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

With heightened expectations for a reckoning in response to the broad support for the Black Lives Matter movement after the senseless murder of George Floyd in 2020, employers explored many options to improve racial understanding through discussions with workers. In rejecting any notions of the existence of structural or systemic discrimination, let alone the need to address the consequences of such discrimination, certain groups have begun to oppose BLM by seeking to diminish any social justice actions. One of those key resistance efforts includes labelling in pejorative terms any employers that pursue anti-racism objectives via social justice statements or internal …


Mass E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring As A Bail Condition, Sara Zampierin May 2023

Mass E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring As A Bail Condition, Sara Zampierin

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, the immigration and criminal legal systems have increasingly relied on electronic monitoring as a bail condition; hundreds of thousands of people live under this monitoring on any given day. Decisionmakers purport to impose these conditions to release more individuals from detention and to maintain control over individuals they perceive to pose some risk of flight or to public safety. But the data do not show that electronic monitoring successfully mitigates these risks or that it leads to fewer individuals in detention. Electronic monitoring also comes with severe restrictions on individual liberty and leads to harmful effects …


Fishing And Fisheries Under International Water Law: A Dialogue Between Professor Gabriel Eckstein And Professor Paul Stanton Kibel, Gabriel Eckstein, Paul Stanton Kibel May 2023

Fishing And Fisheries Under International Water Law: A Dialogue Between Professor Gabriel Eckstein And Professor Paul Stanton Kibel, Gabriel Eckstein, Paul Stanton Kibel

Faculty Scholarship

On April 10 and 11, 2023, the Center on Urban Environmental Law (CUEL) at Golden Gate University School of Law hosted a two-day webinar on International Law Aspects of Fisheries and Hydropower in Europe. To open the webinar, Professor Gabriel Eckstein (of Texas A&M University School of Law) and Professor Paul Stanton Kibel (of Golden Gate University School of Law) participated in a keynote dialogue titled Fishing and Fisheries under International Water Law. What follows is a transcription of this dialogue between Professor Eckstein and Professor Kibel.


Immigration Law's Missing Presumption, Fatma Marouf May 2023

Immigration Law's Missing Presumption, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

The presumption of innocence is a foundational concept in criminal law but is completely missing from quasi-criminal immigration proceedings. This Article explores the relevance of a presumption of innocence to removal proceedings, arguing that immigration law has been designed and interpreted in ways that disrupt formulating any such presumption to facilitate deportation. The Article examines the meaning of “innocence” in the immigration context, revealing how historically racialized perceptions of guilt eroded the notion of innocence early on and connecting the missing presumption to persistent associations between people of color and guilt. By analyzing how a presumption of innocence is impeded …


Creating Persistent Law Review Article Links With Digital Object Identifiers, Valeri Craigle, Benjamin J. Keele, Aaron Retteen May 2023

Creating Persistent Law Review Article Links With Digital Object Identifiers, Valeri Craigle, Benjamin J. Keele, Aaron Retteen

Faculty Scholarship

A case study for how to use digital object identifiers (DOIs) to make online journals more accessible and improve their site user reports.


Pro-Choice Plans, Brendan S. Maher May 2023

Pro-Choice Plans, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the United States Constitution may no longer protect abortion, but a surprising federal statute does. That statute is called the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”), and it has long been one of the most powerful preemptive statutes in the entire United States Code. ERISA regulates “employee benefit plans,” which are the vehicle by which approximately 155 million people receive their health insurance. Plans are thus a major private payer for health benefits—and therefore abortions. While many post-Dobbs anti-abortion laws directly bar abortion by making either the receipt or provision of …


Grid Governance In The Energy-Trilemma Era: Remedying The Democracy Deficit, Daniel E. Walters, Andrew N. Kleit May 2023

Grid Governance In The Energy-Trilemma Era: Remedying The Democracy Deficit, Daniel E. Walters, Andrew N. Kleit

Faculty Scholarship

Transforming the electric power grid is central to any viable scenario for addressing global climate change, but the process and politics of this transformation are complex. The desire to transform the grid creates an “energy trilemma” involving often conflicting desires for reliability, cost, and decarbonization; and, at least in the short run, it is difficult to avoid making tradeoffs between these different goals. It is somewhat shocking, then, that many crucial decisions about electric power service in the United States are made not by consumers or their utilities, nor by state public utilities commissions or federal regulators. Instead, for much …


Gamestopped: How Robinhood’S Gamestop Trading Halt Reveals The Complexities Of Retail Investor Protection, Neal Newman May 2023

Gamestopped: How Robinhood’S Gamestop Trading Halt Reveals The Complexities Of Retail Investor Protection, Neal Newman

Faculty Scholarship

Should brokers have the unfettered right to restrict investor trading? GameStop, a brick-and-mortar video game retailer, had been experiencing declining revenues since 2016. However, GameStop saw its share price climb almost 1000 percent in the span of a one- week period from January 21, 2021 to January 27, 2021 due to retail investors buying significant amounts of GameStop shares during that period. Melvin Capital, a hedge fund, ended up losing billions as they were betting that GameStop shares would lose value instead of increase—a practice referred to as short selling. On January 28, 2021, brokers inexplicably halted trading on GameStop …


If We Build It, Will They Legislate? Empirically Testing The Potential Of The Nondelegation Doctrine To Curb Congressional "Abdication", Daniel E. Walters, Elliott Ash Apr 2023

If We Build It, Will They Legislate? Empirically Testing The Potential Of The Nondelegation Doctrine To Curb Congressional "Abdication", Daniel E. Walters, Elliott Ash

Faculty Scholarship

A widely held view for why the Supreme Court would be right to revive the nondelegation doctrine is that Congress has perverse incentives to abdicate its legislative role and evade accountability through the use of delegations, either expressly delineated or implied through statutory imprecision, and that enforcement of the nondelegation doctrine would correct for those incentives. We call this the Field of Dreams Theory—if we build the nondelegation doctrine, Congress will legislate. Unlike originalist arguments for the revival of the nondelegation doctrine, this theory has widespread appeal and is instrumental to the Court’s project of gaining popular acceptance of a …


Three Megatrends In The International Intellectual Property Regime, Peter K. Yu Apr 2023

Three Megatrends In The International Intellectual Property Regime, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Since the establishment of the Paris and Berne Conventions, the international intellectual property regime has encountered two world wars, struggled with several global pandemics, welcomed dozens of newly independent nations and interacted with a wide variety of technologies and innovative practices. Although this regime progressed only slowly for the larger part of its first century, it saw major transformation in the past four decades, including the adoption of the WTO TRIPS Agreement.

Written in commemoration of the centennial of the American Branch of the International Law Association, this article identifies three megatrends to illuminate the magnitude and ramifications of such …


The Legal Ethics Of Family Separation, Milan Markovic Mar 2023

The Legal Ethics Of Family Separation, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

On April 6, 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy for individuals who crossed the U.S. border illegally. As part of this policy, the administration prosecuted parents with minor children for unlawful entry; previous administrations generally placed families in civil removal proceedings. Since U.S. law does not allow children to be held in immigration detention facilities pending their parents’ prosecution, the new policy caused thousands of children to be separated from their parents. Hundreds of families have yet to be reunited.

Despite a consensus that the family separation policy was cruel and ineffective, there has been minimal focus …


A Response To Rules Of Medical Necessity, Brendan S. Maher Mar 2023

A Response To Rules Of Medical Necessity, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

Professors Monahan and Schwarcz’s recent Article in the Iowa Law Review, Rules of Medical Necessity, is a must-read for multiple audiences. In this short Response, I informally describe health insurance, and—using that perspective—describe and comment on why Rules of Medical Necessity is a piece of work that not only deserves attention from experts in the field, but is also one that casual readers should choose first when attempting to understand how health insurance works in theory and practice.


Defeating De Facto Disenfranchisement Of Criminal Defendants, Neil Sobol Mar 2023

Defeating De Facto Disenfranchisement Of Criminal Defendants, Neil Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

In a democracy, voting is not only an important civic duty but also a right that governments owe to their citizens. However, by operation of law, forty-eight states deny voting rights to individuals based on criminal convictions. Activists and scholars attack de jure disenfranchisement as an improper collateral consequence that disproportionately impacts people of color. Although recent years show substantial reforms to reenfranchise defendants, an estimated 5.17 million defendants remained ineligible to vote in 2020.

While efforts to address de jure disenfranchisement remain necessary, a problem that has received considerably less attention is the de facto disenfranchisement of criminal defendants …